96 Quotes by James Weldon Johnson

A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.... No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

The colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.

Shortly after this I was made a member of the boys' choir, it being found that I possessed a clear, strong soprano voice. I enjoyed the singing very much.

Lift every voice and sing.

It is the spirit of the South to defend everything belonging to it. The North is too cosmopolitan and tolerant for such a spirit.

And God stepped out on space, and He looked around and said: I’m lonely – I’ll make me a world.

Can you imagine,” he went on to say, “what would have been the condition of things eventually if there had been no war, and the South had been allowed to follow its course? Instead of one great, prosperous country with nothing before it but the conquests of peace, a score of petty republics, as in Central and South America, wasting their energies in war with each other pr om revolutions.

You are young, gifted, and Black. We must begin to tell our young, There’s a world waiting for you, Yours is the quest that’s just begun.

For days I could talk of nothing else with my mother except my ambitions to be a great man, a great colored man, to reflect credit on the race and gain fame for myself.